Measuring the Reliability of Qualitative Text Analysis Data

This paper reports a new tool for assessing thereliability of text interpretationsheretofore unavailable to qualitative research.It responds to a combination of twochallenges, the problem of assessing the reliabilityof multiple interpretations – asolution to this problem was anticipated earlier(Krippendorff, 1992) but not fullydeveloped – and the problem of identifying unitsof analysis within a continuum of textand similar representations (Krippendorff, 1995).The paper sketches the family of-coefficients, which this paper extends, andthen describes its new arrival.A computational example is included in the Appendix.